Benedict Coulter was rushing to finish the first trailer for Baz Luhrmann's "Australia," a World War II-era drama starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, in time to get it delivered to theaters with May's "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull."
When he showed his version to the director and the brass at 20th Century Fox, Luhrmann liked it but thought the music could use more oomph.
So Tom Rothman, Fox's studio chief, suggested Coulter listen to the score from 1989's "Henry V," a historical drama he oversaw while at Samuel Goldwyn Films. Coulter quickly found a rousing cue to highlight the epic feel of the film.
"A trailer is always a collaboration between the filmmakers, the studio and the vendor," Coulter said. "That bit of music was the finishing touch we needed. All of a sudden, the piece looked like it was supposed to look and felt like it was supposed to feel."
For three decades, Coulter, 54, has teamed with filmmakers and studio executives on some 250 movie trailers and 1,000 television ads. The tall, dapper French native is president of Hollywood-based Trailer Park, among the largest of 30 or so firms that compete to make most of the "coming attractions" shown before the features at the nation's multiplexes, but he still personally produces or edits about a dozen trailers a year.
Coulter fell into the field when a career in music fizzled. He moved to Los Angeles from Paris in 1976 to play guitar with a blues band called KGB. Coulter got one gig with Chuck Berry at the old Wolf & Rissmiller's Country Club in Reseda but realized "there were better guitar players than me at the farmers market."
He became a delivery man at a Sunset Strip liquor store and then a messenger at movie ad agency Kaleidoscope Films, staying 17 years and working up to projectionist, apprentice editor and then editor, starting there in the days when trailers were assembled on a hulking Moviola instead of a sleek Mac computer.
"I stumbled upon a world I didn't know existed: movie marketing," he said.
Colleagues remember his cowboy boots, Mustang convertible and youthful swagger, but Coulter recalls being intimidated on his first job of producing and editing a trailer -- for 1980's not-so-classic "Smokey and the Bandit II." When he went to Florida to record narration from Jackie Gleason, he pretended to be a sound man to keep the legendary star from scoffing at his youth.
